Category Archives: Over the Transom

Center, Texas & Logansport, Louisiana

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The town of Center, Texas is in East Texas, while the town of West, Texas is in Central Texas. Just a mild example of Texas naming oddities. This is the state with Cut and Shoot, Dime Box and Jot-Em-Down, after all.

We spent the night in Center (pop. 5,200) and the next morning, April 14, took a look around the Shelby County Courthouse, which also happens to the focus of downtown Center.Shelby County Courthouse, Texas Shelby County Courthouse, Texas

It’s a less common style for courthouses, Romanesque Revival, at least in my experience. Impressive brickwork. The story of one John Joseph Emmett Gibson is given in a Texas Historical Commission sign on the site. Originally a brickmaker from Ireland, Gibson ultimately made his way to Texas, in time to design and oversee construction of the courthouse in the 1880s, showing off his skill with bricks.

Older than the courthouse is the nearby former jail. These days home to the local C-of-C.Shelby County Courthouse, Texas, old jail

An assortment of buildings line the square. Mostly occupied. That includes the art deco Rio, open since 1926 as a movie theater, without having been closed or put to any other use since then, which is remarkable in itself.Rio Movie Theater, Center, Texas Rio Movie Theater, Center, Texas

Not a retro theater, either, but one showing new movies. Such as Unsung Hero and The Fall Guy, coming soon.

“Unsung Hero is a 2024 American Christian drama film directed by Richard Ramsey and Joel Smallbone. The film follows Rebecca, Joel, and Luke Smallbone of For King & Country, and their life journey to become Christian recording artists.”

“The Fall Guy is a 2024 American action comedy film directed by David Leitch and written by Drew Pearce, loosely based on the 1980s TV series about stunt performers. The film follows a stuntman working on his ex-girlfriend’s directorial debut action film, only to find himself involved in a conspiracy surrounding the film’s lead actor.”

I’d never heard of either of them, but now I have. 1980s TV series about stunt performers? That didn’t ring a bell either. So that’s what Glen A. Larson did after the implosion of the original Battlestar Galactica, and Lee Majors did after the Six Million Dollar Man was retired for lack of replacement parts.

How did I miss that? Right, I didn’t have a television in the ’80s.

More buildings on the square.Downtown Center, Texas Downtown Center, Texas

One that’s small but stately. Farmers of Shelby County, it says, your money is safe here.Farmers State Bank, Center, Texas

It was. Farmers is still an ongoing operation, nearly 120 years after its founding. The bank still occupies the building, and has other locations in East Texas.

Not every building on the square is occupied.Downtown Center, Texas

Not every building is even a building any more, but clues remain.Downtown Center, Texas, O.H. Polley ruin Downtown Center, Texas, O.H. Polley ruin

That didn’t take long to look up. Site of a dry goods store for much of the 20th century.

Shelby County partly borders De Soto Parish, Louisiana. That morning, we headed for the border, driving on Texas 7 and then U.S. 84 until we got to a town without any sign noting its name (or maybe we missed it), crossing a river without any identification either. I remembered I wanted to mail a few postcards when I saw a sign pointing the way to a post office. When we got to the p.o., I saw that we were in Logansport, Louisiana. We’d crossed the Sabine River, but as noted, there was nothing to tell us that.

Missed the former international boundary marker, too. I didn’t read about it until later. It’s a few miles out of Logansport (pop. 1,300), and once (and briefly) marked the border between the Republic of Texas and the United States.

No matter. Took a look around Logansport.Logansport, Louisiana

Here’s the name we missed. Not on the road we came in on.Logansport, La

Main Street.Logansport, La Logansport, La Logansport, La

Seen in a shop window in Main Street. Do they celebrate Mardi Gras in Logansport?Logansport, La

Yes they do, in the form of a parade put on my an outfit called the Krewe of Aquarius.

We spent some time in a resale store on the main street, Swamp Water Flea Market. I spotted something I don’t think I’ve ever seen at a resale shop.Logansport, La

Yours for $150, an antique leg iron. Not sure I’d want to have it around. Seems like a haunted artifact that might land you in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Ollie Warhol

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Today was about as raw an April day as I can remember, with more cold rain and snappy winds to come tomorrow. This year it’s as if early February traded places with early April, though not quite. At least the snow melted.

With a digital camera, anyone can create Warhol-like images.

When Andy Warhol died in 1987, he was already playing with computerized images. What if he’d lived long enough to create web sites? What would he have done with social media?

All that occurred to me at the catch-as-catch-can retailer Ollie’s, though the thought could have been inspired by many retailers.

The last time I was there, more politically inspired dog toys had turned up.

I was tempted to acquire Slick Willie to go with Bernie. But no. Not because we don’t have a dog any more. She would have chewed such toys to bits, so it wouldn’t have been for her, but just a whimsy of mine. But I have enough useless items. Not, however, enough useless images, which take up a lot less physical space.

The Odds

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A random thought today: Do the Irish bookies take bets on when and which company will be indicted next for antitrust violations? One table of odds for the U.S. and a different one for the European Union?

Not sure why I thought of that. Just one of those passing notions.

Nephi on the Sidewalk

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Today I’m reminded of the old joke whose punchline is, “He called me from Salt Lake City.” If you know it, you know it, but enough to say that Mormonism is the crux of that joke.

We took a walk around a northwest suburban pond late this afternoon, a familiar place, but there was unfamiliar writing on one of the many stretches of sidewalk.

Illustration to the left.

3 Nephi 11:14? That didn’t sound familiar. Maybe a book in the Douay version I don’t know about? I’ve never been able to remember all of its distinctions from the KJB. I forgot about my passing, and erroneous, thought until I downloaded the pictures later. That was the time to look it up. It’s from the Book of Mormon.

That’s a first in my experience, Mormon graffiti.

Somehow the Bernie Bros Missed This One

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A few weeks ago, I went again to Ollie’s, whose appeal is the randomness of its merchandise, and there he was, among the packaged foods and housewares and small appliances and furniture and bric-a-brac, no other stuffed politicos around, no tag or bar code.

“This the funniest thing I’ve seen all day,” I said to the clerk. “How much?”

I was only kidding. It was the funniest thing I’d seen all week, maybe all month. He spent a minute or so tapping into a laptop near the register, but soon gave up the chase. “How about $3.99?” he said.

Sold.

A product of Fuzzu, a Vermont designer of pet toys. I’d say maker, but for Bernie at least that occurred in China. Bernie isn’t alone — well, he was when I found him, but had he been separated, a la Toy Story, from the rest of the Fuzzu stable? Joe, Kamala, Donald, Mike, Hillary, Bill and Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin.

Mike? The former Mayor Bloomberg, it seems, since on his back is “Pop Cop.”

Now Bernie joins my small collection of presidential ephemera: postcards, a few buttons, my Franklin Pierce bobblehead and William Henry Harrison Pez dispenser and Eugene V. Debs ribbon. My definition of presidential is pretty broad, and certainly includes serious if quixotic candidates for the nomination.

Early Equinox

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Our downstairs calendar is astronomy themed, obtained from my Secret Santa at work during the holidays. The year before, I’d asked for postcards, and got some packs of them. I decided an astronomy calendar would be the thing last Christmas, so that is what I asked for.

It’s called Astronomy with Phil Harrington, published by Willow Creek Press. Harrington seems to be something of a cottage industry when it comes to popular astronomy works. As for Willow Creek, it publishes scads of calendars, from Abstract Art 2024 to Zoo in a Box. Good for them. My calendar suggestions for 2025: Great Elevators of Europe, Vintage American Bottle Caps, and Classic TV Shows That Lasted A Season Or Less.

It’s a fine calendar, chock-a-block with information, and excellent images of celestial sights. For March, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image, said to capture roughly 10,000 galaxies, an imponderable number of places and yet a vanishingly tiny fraction of them all. For April: a photo of the total eclipse of 2017, for obvious reasons.

I look at the calendar often. I looked at it this morning and learned that today is the vernal equinox, at 10:06 p.m. Central Daylight Time, when the sun appears straight above the equator, headed (so to speak) northward. Not, I think, the “first day of spring.” Not around here anyway. For the last week, the chill we didn’t get much in February has slipped into March.

I’d have thought the equinox would be on the 20th or 21st, and I suppose by Coordinated Universal Time it is on the 20th, but the time I care about is CDT. Turns out the vernal equinox is earlier than usual this year, due to the leap year and other factors too complicated for me to relate.

As if to mark the vernal equinox – though I’m sure it’s a coincidence – a tree service hired by the village came by today to trim the trees along the street. Those in the “parkway,” that is, the land between the street and the lot lines, and thus belonging to the village. Public trees.

After the trimming, which I was too busy to document, came a wood chipper. I was ready for that.

I noticed that the machine is a Morbark brand. (Not Mo’BetterBark.) I had to look that up. Turns out the village is supporting Michigan manufacturing by having one.

“The year was 1957 when Norval Morey, a local sawmill operator, took the first risky step into manufacturing armed with a patent for a portable pulp wood debarker,” the company web site says. “The Morbark Debarker Company was born that year, and nobody in Winn, Michigan, could have predicted the growth that the company would experience over the next five decades.”

Fearsome machines, those wood chippers. The kind of death maw that a villain dangles James Bond over, only to fall in himself when 007 inevitably makes his escape from the trap.

The Bond bon mot at that moment (Roger Moore, I picture it): “Bet that chap has a grinding headache.”

Paper

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Sometimes I think about writing paper letters regularly again. Something like once or twice a month maybe, just short notes to different people I used to correspond with that way. Even those of us who used to create voluminous amounts of paper letters – and I did – don’t do so any more. I keep up the volume of postcards, but not letters. I toy with this idea, but nothing has come of it yet.

That came to mind rummaging through my letter files recently. I found this.

Twenty years ago, my 78-year-old mother in Texas writes to her six-year-old granddaughter in Illinois, whose 26-year-old self happens to be visiting us now. I don’t think my mother sent an email or text message in her life, and she was no worse for it. I’d say as long as this paper letter and others of hers are accessible to those of us who knew her, her memory is no worse for it either.

A Palatine Water Tower in its Blue Period

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On short Sunday, we made our way to Palatine, Illinois, in the afternoon. As home to more than 67,000 residents, it’s no small chunk of northwest Cook County.

Those residents need water.

I’d driven by that water tower on the Northwest Highway (US 14) periodically for years, and decided it was high time I took a look while standing still. Once upon a time, up until 2016, the tower was painted to look more like a stereotypical lighthouse, including figures that evoked the sort of windows you might see on a lighthouse. That was done away with, but it’s a pleasant blue.

Another source tells us that it is an “18,000 ton water tower,” but not whether that’s without water or the weight of the water that it can hold. Wouldn’t the capacity of water towers be in gallons? It is, at least according to Watermedia.org.

Not far away, but tucked away from any major street, is the village hall.

Looks newish, as indeed it is: completed in 2016 by Camosy Construction.

I couldn’t go inside. Maybe that’s where the distinctive civic details of Palatine are, such small memorials or plaques or the like? There was nothing outside that I could see, unless you count this.

The mayor’s parking spot, within view of Wood Street, named for a resident of early Palatine (founded 1866). The mayor, since 2009, happens to be James Schwantz, a former pro football player.

Magic Places

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First thing to do today is Remember the Alamo.

There’s been a recent uptick in bogus comments here, which I almost always delete, along the lines of (this example, verbatim): Thanks for a marvelous posting! I genuinely enjoyed reading it, you could be a great author. I will be sure to bookmark your blog and will eventually come back later in life. I want to encourage continue your great writing, have a nice day!

The “author” is usually listed as some service- or product-oriented operation, occasionally lewd but more often personal accessories of some kind, with a gmail address. To recall Buck Turgidson, I’m beginning to smell a big, fat AI rat.

I hung up the last 2024 wall calendar the other day, fourth of four in the house. One might think that illustrates my procrastinating ways, since we’ve burned through a sixth of the year already (the crummiest sixth, I should add). But no, I hung an accurate calendar there around New Year’s. The 2018 Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago calendar.

The year’s different, but so what? The first two months were the same as this year, but that changed on February 29, so I needed another calendar to avoid confusion, a year in which March 1 is a Friday. The most recent leap year to fit the bill (besides this year) would be 1996, but I didn’t seem to have one of those around or, oddly, any other calendar that qualified. No worries, I saw a wad of ’24 calendars at Ollie’s not long ago and picked one of the lot for $4, compared with a list price of $17. Nice discount, and I get 10 months at 40 cents each, instead of 12 months at about $1.40 each. Not much you can buy for 40 cents these days.

It’s a Plato calendar, an imprint of BrownTrout Publishers, which asserts that it is The Calendar Company. I had to look that up: headquartered in El Sugundo, California, BrownTrout published 1,500 unique titles as of 2020, according to the latest press release boilerplate issued by the company (recommendation, put a few newer releases on your site, BrownTrout). The site also says the company is the largest calendar publisher in the world, and it may be so, if that means calendars sold. Or does it mean days put on paper?

The one I bought at Ollie’s is called Magic Places. Handsome Rocky Places might be more like it. Mostly it pictures extraordinary rock features, natural and partly man-made, the kind of flawless and painterly pics you get from this kind of calendar, including sites in Scotland (three), England, Turkey, Greenland, Russia, and more. The likes of the Old Man of Storr, Cappadocia, Machu Picchu and Hegra in Saudi Arabia. One month wasn’t rocky but a monumental tree in Epping Forest in Essex, which I vaguely had heard of, but didn’t really know.

Just shows that Greater London is so vast, not even a month there is enough to hear of everything, especially in the days before the Internet. Once a royal forest, these days Epping is owned by the City of London Corp., even since – this isn’t hard to guess – the Victorian period.

Magic Places is a good-looking trilingual calendar, including Spanish and French as well to cover North America, and it has most of the standard holidays: U.S., Canada and Mexico civic, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, along with those days peculiar to American calendar-making tradition, such as Ground Hog Day, April Fool’s Day and Grandparents Day. There are also Low Countries holidays, which I suppose is a good market for the calendar maker.

It made my day to learn that besides being Cinco de Mayo, May 5 is Bevrijdingsdag in the Netherlands, Liberation Day. A holiday to celebrate ousting Nazis is one we can all get behind.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Land in 1348

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An online ad today made me laugh. For an airline offering service to Dubrovnik. The tag line:

The mind boggles. What does United have, a fleet of Tardises? I think you’d be at some risk of landing smack dab in the Black Death, but if not that, a generally unhealthy destination for us moderns, even with all our shots. That’s not all. This might be a direct flight, but does another route offer a stopover at the Enlightenment, or maybe the Belle Époque?

I get it. The copywriter – he, she or it – is trading on the romance of Dubrovnik, which by all accounts is a picturesque yet modern place. But still I laugh. What currency did they use in 14th-century Dubrovnik anyway, which would more properly be the Republic of Ragusa? Surely they don’t want dollars, so maybe you’d have to take silver or gold specie. And good luck finding anyone that speaks English there or even decent wifi.

I had to look it up. The currency would have been the tallero, one new to me, but from the right period. Numisma also gives the following table:

Figuring out the purchasing power of any of these would be a real chore, so I’ll pass. But be careful that you don’t get hundreds of follari in change.